Chapter 70
#70 Phantom Thief Dauphin (14) - A Plausible Excuse
“From this moment on, the guard force is withdrawing from the crackdown on Dauphin.”
At Guard Commander Bover's order, the platoon leaders of Rebruk were all stunned.
“Pull out? You mean we’re not supposed to catch Dauphin anymore?”
“It’s been the guard force that has been fighting Dauphin all this time!”
The platoon leaders' protests made Bover's brow furrow.
Ever since arriving in Rebruk, he had been in a foul mood, and the fact that he had been dragged all the way here to fill in for some incompetent company commander in the first place made his irritation all the more obvious.
So, without bothering to soften it, he said it outright.
“It was Knight Commander Sarnos's order. He said we’d only get in the way if we stayed, so we should move aside completely. Do I need to explain any further?”
“…….”
The platoon leaders fell silent in an instant.
The knight commander represented the knights. The guard commander represented the guard.
They were both positions responsible for a group, but the knight order, made up mostly of nobles, and the guard, made up mainly of commoners, were different in status altogether.
Bover was unhappy about the guard being treated as an afterthought too, of course, but once the knight commander himself had issued the order, there was no way for him to disobey it.
While everyone else was silent, only Dalia quietly raised her hand.
The battalion commander reacted.
“What is it?”
“If we’re going to stand guard with the knights alone, we won’t have enough people.”
“That bandit's current 'targets' should be down to fewer than fifty, shouldn't they? There are exactly one hundred regular knights here now, so if we assign two to each person and guard them day and night, that should be enough.”
“It’s not enough.”
“…What?”
“I’m saying one knight isn’t enough to stop him. And with that kind of arrangement, the gaps between each knight will be wide, so it’ll take longer for support to arrive from outside. Rather than waiting beside the target for him to show up, we need steady reconnaissance and vigilance so we can spot Dauphin before he reaches the target and call for support.”
“Hold on, hold on a second.”
Bover cut Dalia off, then frowned in irritation as if he couldn’t understand what she was saying.
“Do you know what the condition is for a squire to become a regular knight in the Sarnos Knight Order?”
“Not exactly, no.”
“There are several detailed conditions, but the key one is this: they must be able to manifest sword aura. In other words, each and every one of them is a Grade 4 powerhouse.”
Grade 4 talents were rare.
Even within Birka, if a lord with a fairly large estate—one big enough to be regarded as a 'city'—had one hidden ace, he’d be lucky. And even if the Adventurers' Guild, which had influence throughout the kingdom, scraped together talent from everywhere, there were only about fifty people who were truly Grade 4 in the real sense, not just adventurer rank.
In that sense, the Sarnos Knight Order, which had not sent out even all of its members but only part of them—though that part was a majority—and still produced a full hundred Grade 4 fighters, could proudly call itself Birka's strongest martial force in both name and fact.
“Are you saying those strong knights are losing to nothing more than a mere bandit? And they can't even hold out by themselves until the reinforcements arrive?”
“Dauphin is skilled at ambush and deception. Once he snatches the initiative by exploiting a psychological blind spot, even the most outstanding knight can be reduced to less than half his usual ability and be taken down as is.”
Dalia took a breath and tried to persuade the battalion commander logically.
The problem was that logical arguments didn’t necessarily mean the other person would listen.
In fact, the battalion commander waved her off irritably and cut Dalia off.
“Enough. It’s already been decided, so don’t argue. If you do anything pointless, I’ll take it as insubordination and punish you immediately.”
Seeing that the battalion commander had no intention of continuing the conversation, Dalia quietly sighed to herself.
Fine, maybe she was worrying over nothing.
In the end, could the strongest knight order in the kingdom of Birka really be beaten so easily?
***
Meanwhile, at the Sarnos Knight Order at that very moment.
“Honestly, is this really something worth all of us swarming out for?”
“The guards being incompetent isn't exactly new. If you think of it as a little outing instead of the daily drills, it's not that bad, is it?”
“Tch. I thought I’d finally get a chance to swing my sword, and it’s only one thief. If anything, I wish it were a bandit group with a few hundred men.”
They were knights who honed their skills day by day with the count's support, but the chance to actually wield that martial power almost never came.
War? Sarnos was locked in fierce competition with Redbel right now, but even so, they weren’t reckless enough to suddenly send out knights and start an armed conflict. Not unless they had no choice.
Public order? Those lowly jobs were for the guard, not the knight order. Why use a butcher’s knife to kill a chicken?
If it were a bandit group of some size, it might be worth considering once, but bandits had survival instincts too, so they wouldn’t go anywhere near Count Sarnos's domain unless they had to. In a kingdom like Birka where public order was a complete disaster, there were plenty of other places to rob.
Escort duty? There were few enough people crazy enough to target Count Sarnos, the kingdom's most powerful man and a Grade 4 knight himself, and even if they were preparing for assassination risk, that wasn’t the sort of job for an order of over a hundred knights to devote all its manpower to. Not because it wasn’t important, but because it was simply too wasteful in manpower.
So among the members of the Sarnos Knight Order, there were quite a few who secretly looked forward to some big battle or some incident where they could earn merit.
Count Sarnos was generous with his knights, so they had no complaints about the treatment itself, but satisfying their boiling blood and their hunger for merit was another matter.
And to those knights, this mission was frankly terribly dull.
After all, what excitement or interest could they possibly feel when a hundred-odd people had swarmed in just to catch one thief?
“Still, they say he’s quite skilled, so wouldn’t fighting him be fun?”
“No matter how skilled he is, if he’s only at the level of going back and forth evenly with a single guard, you can tell how it’ll go.”
“Well, I guess that’s true.”
Of course, these men were all elite among elites chosen by Count Sarnos.
Regardless of their lack of interest or motivation, they were extremely faithful to the mission itself.
With some of the kingdom's finest knights attached as dedicated escorts, standing by the nobles' sides day and night, the nobles who were the targets were satisfied as well.
“Having a knight beside you really does make a difference! I’ve been losing sleep every night until now.”
“Haha, please rest easy. As long as I'm by your side, my lord, a bandit like that won't dare come anywhere near you.”
“I’m happy about it, of course, but isn’t this troublesome for you? If the fellow gets frightened and doesn’t come out, you won’t be able to catch him, will you?”
“Oh, that would be a blind spot!”
“Hahaha!”
No one—knights, nobles, or commoners alike—doubted the Sarnos Knight Order's victory.
How could proper knights possibly lose to a bandit who had already been held off by even a single guard?
“…This is strange. Why does it feel like the difficulty got easier even though the stage moved on? Why were the competent guards moved somewhere else? Did I miss some high-level trap?”
[So, are you giving up?]
“As a phantom thief, I can’t do that when my pride is on the line! If my opponent is going to challenge me like this, I have no choice but to pay them back with an even bigger, more intense hit!”
About three days later.
Six of the remaining targets were abducted by Dauphin and displayed in the form of a human pyramid, and the knights escorting them were all found unconscious in an alleyway by passersby.
The city was thrown into chaos.
***
People have expectations.
Even if food bought for pocket change from a shabby little shop tastes bad, people won’t get that angry.
But if food bought at a high price from a top-tier restaurant tastes terrible, people will be furious.
The current state of the Sarnos Knight Order fit this exactly.
The strongest fighting force in the kingdom.
Powerhouses of at least Grade 4.
The symbol of power held by the House of Sarnos.
All sorts of grandiose labels had raised expectations of them, and everyone had thought they'd show something amazing—but the results they actually produced were far too pathetic.
As if the first time he had taken down six people at once had been a springboard, Dauphin repeated his raids at nearly daily intervals and succeeded every time.
The first time he got hit, they could excuse it as carelessness.
The second time they were caught, they could excuse it by saying they still hadn’t adjusted.
But by the third time they were made fools of by Dauphin, the Sarnos Knight Order had no excuse left to offer.
No, to be precise, even when they offered excuses, nobody around them would listen.
“The guards at least managed to respond somehow, but here you're just getting beaten one-sidedly, aren't you?”
“You were all running your mouths about how you came because the guards couldn't do their jobs properly, and now the ones who really can't do theirs are you.”
“They called it punishment and made the guard company commander half-crippled, but somehow they themselves aren't being punished at all. It's ridiculous.”
Of course, people didn’t go spouting things like that openly in front of the knights.
But judging from the subtle looks cast their way and the way people whispered from a distance, there was no way they wouldn't know what sort of position they were in within Rebruk right now.
“You useless morons…!!”
The knight commander flew into a rage.
That fury was directed both at the bandit who had started running wild as if this were his moment, and at the subordinates who had shown such pathetic results.
He hadn’t expected anything amazing.
Just tell me when Dauphin shows up, and hold out until I arrive on the scene.
Were those two things really so hard?
The excuses the members blurted out were all over the place.
A hand suddenly shot out from underwater and dragged him under; something he thought was a wall suddenly turned out to be a person; he slashed at what he thought was the guy only to find it was just a doll, and so on.
“A mere guard platoon leader managed it, but the underlings I raised with all that money can't.”
At the knight commander’s lament, the deputy commander reacted.
“As for that part, we’ve uncovered something a little suspicious.”
“Something suspicious?”
“Yes. The 8th platoon leader who fought Dauphin in a fierce clash before we arrived turned out to be the daughter of none other than the 'Traitor of Arc.'”
The Traitor of Arc.
The moment he heard that name, the knight commander’s eyes flashed sharply.
“Is that true? That man's daughter is working here as a guard? How?”
“There was a royal decree, wasn't there? If that traitor took his own life without resistance, the commoners and others involved in the rebellion at the time would be pardoned. Thanks to that, she must have avoided execution and wandered around before settling here.”
“Even so, you mean they fooled a bunch of bumpkins into having the daughter of someone who had drawn a sword against the nobles join the guard? Ah, did she hide her identity?”
“No, apparently she confessed it herself when she joined the guard. Thanks to that, older nobles had found her objectionable until quite recently.”
“That’s only natural. What I want to know is why she was allowed to keep working in the guard in the first place. Was the idiot who approved it mentally deficient?”
“Uh, well, according to the records, the count happened to stop by Rebruk at the time and approved it, saying it looked interesting….”
“…Hmph. Ahem! As expected of the count. What a truly merciful man he is.”
The knight commander acted as though he were trying to pretend the insult he had just spat out had never happened, and the deputy commander didn’t bother to point it out.
“Then could it be that that guard is someone the count has his eye on?”
“No, that’s not it. It seems that when she first joined the guard, everyone did suspect her and openly shun her, but there's been no mention or order at all even up to the present.”
Given that Count Sarnos preferred impulsive actions over meticulous, planned ones, it was entirely possible that he had simply forgotten Dalia existed.
Having understood the situation, the knight commander wore a strange smile.
“It is certainly ironic. The daughter of a traitor spouting nonsense about the rights of commoners and waving a blade at nobles. And on the other hand, a bandit who’s gone berserk claiming he’s doing it for the lowborn.”
“That bandit is connected to the Arc incident, so it wouldn’t be strange if he were deliberately handing all the credit to the daughter of the man who had led them back then, out of loyalty.”
“What a terrifying thing. You mean the guard, whose job is to protect public order, and the bandit threatening the citizens' safety were actually in the same gang?”
It was all just a conspiracy theory, with not a single plausible piece of evidence.
But the two of them didn’t care.
To prevent anyone from claiming that the proud Sarnos Knight Order was worse than a mere guard, Dalia had to be cast as a traitor who had cooperated with the bandit for the sake of her own honor.
“I’ll have to contact the count. If he hasn’t specifically told us to look after that guard separately, then we’ll need to take 'proper measures.'”
The authority that comes from violence becomes meaningless the moment people stop being afraid.
To maintain that authority, the innocence of a mere guard was hardly something worth worrying about.